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The much awaited Indian made low cost Tablet ‘Akash’ was being released on 5th October by the central Human Resource Development Minister Mr. Kapil Sibal. The most attractive thing about this tablet is being the low cost and the idea of giving it to the students on still lower price by the Government subsidy is a welcome one. According to the press release ‘Akash’ is much likely to be available from the month of December to the students and may be by the next year to the general public. Till now ‘Akash’ is the low cost to be available tablet in the market so it has even raised the eye brows of many developed countries and multi-national companies.

The prototype of ‘Akash’ was released last year and the full fledged development work was done by Data Wind. The specification of the ‘Akash’ is it uses Google Android Operating System version 2.2 Froyo, 366 MHz processor with on chip Graphic Accelerator and HD Video Processor, has 2 GB internal memory expandable up to 32 GB and RAM of 256MB. ‘Akash’ has 7 inch resistive touch screen display and has 2100 mAh Lithium-polymer battery. Internet can be accessed using GPRS and also with Wi-Fi connectivity which is an added advantage. Aircel is likely to be the basic official network provider for connecting to the internet using its 3G SIM cards or even the 3G internet dongles can be used. Also it can be used as a phone!

The tablet is specifically developed to cater the needs of the students, the processor speed and RAM won’t be of much hurdle depending on the simple applications most likely to be run by the students. ‘Akash’ may not be useful for business applications as much as other tablets.

The reception of the tablet by the students and teaching community is of much curiosity as many students and teachers are not aware of technologies and using tablets. Training will be helpful for doing so. No product can be perfect on its first release, hope ‘Akash’ will also make some changes in its future releases and also the company Data Wind is planning for tablets as low as $10 making use of locally available components.